Why do hackers target law firms? Simply put-  The weak cybersecurity of law firms make them an irresistible lucrative easy target for hackers. Not only are they a goldmine for highly sensitive corporate, financial, and personal data, but also because most firms aren’t prepared to fight off such attacks.

Hackers target law firms with a vengeance — An ALM Legal Intelligence’s cybersecurity report, 95% of corporate counsel agree that cyber-attacks are becoming more frequent. But most law firms continue to ignore the threat with nearly one-third not undergoing any formal information, cybersecurity, and privacy assessment.

Just take a look at what happened to global law firm DLA Piper, who, after proclaiming themselves experts on cybersecurity (even offering their services to affected companies through their 24/7 Rapid Response hotline) fell victim to a massive ransomware attack. Ouch.

For days, they were unable to have access to their files and had to revert to good ol’ fashioned texting to manage the law firm’s operations. And with companies losing anywhere from $300,000 to $1.7 million every hour of downtime, it’s not surprising that it’s still reeling from the attack.

In house IT or outsourced — which one is better for your law firm? As a law firm, you deal with clients on a daily basis. These clients trust you with their confidential data—data that you have to entrust to a team of experienced employees. These employees juggle multiple tasks—clients and cases, deadlines and documents, managing the law firm and ensuring seamless administrative efficiency. Most importantly, everything has to run with exceptional precision, simultaneously. That’s a lot, even for established companies. And to help them with it, they seek out IT solutions for law firms that can give them a competitive edge.

Whether you’re a legal administrator, office administrator or managing partner in your law firm, you need to lead the charge to create awareness around data privacy for lawyers in your firm. Examining the reasons behind cyber insurance claims, the numbers reveal that the biggest threat accounting firms face is internal — the lack of training among its employees and contractors.

There are lot’s of self-serving puff-pieces out on the internet that are thinly veiled sales brochures with little to no useful information – this isn’t one of those!!

Picking an IT Support partner for your Law Firm can be tricky.   The best way to avoid a misstep is to follow a systematic approach with your decision, one that helps you check all the boxes and look at this decision in the right way.

Natural disasters like Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Michael remind us of the importance of building a data recovery plan for law firms: managed services providers keep you in business – rain or shine.